Is Trump Wrecking Both Parties?

Donald J. Trump with supporters in Windham, N.H., last Saturday.CreditCreditIlana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times

On Aug. 7, Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America, a center-left Washington think tank, posted some of the findings from an Aug. 1 CNN surveyon Twitter with a succinct comment:

In case you weren’t convinced Democrats are becoming the cosmopolitan elite party.

The table showed support for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump by income and education. It leads to a clear conclusion.

Trump is competitive among the less affluent and those without college degrees, among whom he is behind by 3 and 4 points respectively. But Clinton is crushing him among college graduates (57-34) and among those making $50,000 or more (55-37).

The current education and income patterns reflect a reversal of the way Bill Clinton first won the presidency in 1992. Bill Clinton beat George H.W. Bush by double-digit margins among voters making less than $50,000, but lost among voters making $100,000 or more, 54-38. In 1992, Clinton won by similarly large margins among those with high school degrees or less, while losing college graduates 41-39.

The larger conclusion from the data is that the Trump campaign — both through the support Trump generates among working-class whites and the opposition he generates among better educated, more affluent voters — has accelerated the ongoing transformation of the Democratic Party. Once a class-based coalition, the party has become an alliance between upscale well-educated whites and, importantly, ethnic and racial minorities, many of them low income.

“The voice of the left — especially the old social democratic left — has lost force in recent years,” Ian Buruma, a professor of democracy, human rights, and journalism at Bard College, wrote me in an email.

This is partly because leftwing parties since the 1960s began to switch their attention from working class struggle to identity politics.

There is, Buruma went on,

a common anxiety about the effects of globalism, multinational corporate power, immigration. More and more people feel unrepresented. When they complained about immigration or the bewildering changes effected by a global economy, such people were too easily dismissed as racists and bigots. Now they blame the “liberal elites” for all their anxieties.

Dani Rodrik, a professor of international political economy at Harvard, is even harsher in his critique of contemporary liberalism. “Economists and technocrats on the left bear a large part of the blame,” Rodrik writes, in an essay, “The Abdication of the Left,” published in July by Project Syndicate.

Rodrik does not let up:

They abdicated too easily to market fundamentalism and bought in to its central tenets. Worse still, they led the hyper-globalization movement at crucial junctures. The enthroning of free capital mobility – especially of the short-term kind – as a policy norm by the European Union, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the IMF was arguably the most fateful decision for the global economy in recent decades.

Left policy makers and analysts, Rodrik writes, face

the paradox that earlier waves of reforms from the left – Keynesianism, social democracy, the welfare state – both saved capitalism from itself and effectively rendered themselves superfluous.

If liberal public policy intellectuals are unable develop “a clear program to refashion capitalism and globalization for the twenty-first century,” Rodrik warns, “the field will be left wide open for populists and far-right groups who will lead the world – as they always have – to deeper division and more frequent conflict.”

Instead of serving as the political arm of working and middle class voters seeking to move up the ladder, the Democratic Party faces the prospect of becoming the party of the winners, in collaboration with many of those in the top 20 percent who are determined to protect and secure their economic and social status.

In an interview published by Vox.com on Aug. 8, Robert Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, described the consequences of the emergence of “liberal cosmopolitans, really the upper and middle class of America,” who are

increasingly disconnected from working-class America. I mean that in a very specific sense. Our residences are increasingly segregated by class. Our schools are increasingly segregated by class. Our extended families are increasingly separated by class.

Writing in Politico magazine in May, Michael Lind, also a fellow at New America, argues that this cultural conflict created the political environment that made the Trump phenomenon possible in the first place:

Most culture-war conflicts involve sexuality, gender, or reproduction. Social issues spurred a partisan realignment by changing who considered themselves Democrats and Republicans. Over decades, socially conservative working-class whites migrated from the Democratic Party to join the Republican Party, especially in the South. Socially moderate Republicans, especially on the East Coast, shifted to the Democratic coalition.

The result, in Lind’s view, is an emerging Republican Party dominated by

working-class whites, based in the South and West and suburbs and exurbs everywhere. They will favor universal, contributory social insurance systems that benefit them and their families and reward work effort — programs like Social Security and Medicare. But they will tend to oppose means-tested programs for the poor whose benefits they and their families cannot enjoy.

This shift, Lind points out, will powerfully alter the Democratic coalition, too. The Democrats will become

even more of an alliance of upscale, progressive whites with blacks and Latinos, based in large and diverse cities. They will think of the U.S. as a version of their multicultural coalition of distinct racial and ethnic identity groups writ large. Many younger progressives will take it for granted that moral people are citizens of the world, equating nationalism and patriotism with racism and fascism.

From this vantage point, Trump and the pro-social insurance populist right that has emerged in much of Europe are as much the result of the vacuum created by traditional liberal political parties as they are a function of the neglect of working class interests by conservatives.

You can look at the populist insurgency spearheaded by Donald Trump as either a corrective or a threat to mainstream Republican orthodoxy.

On the threat side, Trump has exploited a racist and authoritarian vein in American politics.

On the corrective side, Trump has tapped into and exploited the inadequacy of the responses coming from both major parties to voters who feel that they are “strangers in their own country.”

There are, however, major hurdles for anyone determined to capitalize on the Trump campaign in order to force an internal realignment of the Republican Party.

Trump has already demonstrated the ability to leap over one of those hurdles: the social conservatism of the Christian Right.

Trump’s political base was among the party’s white working- and middle-class voters — precisely the voters who had originally flocked to Wallace and then to Nixon, who had been attracted by Perot and Buchanan, but who now felt that they had found a champion in Trump. He had become the voice of Middle American radicalism and more broadly of the white Americans who felt left behind by globalization and the shift to a postindustrial economy.

Inglehart and Norris view animosity to cosmopolitan cultural trends as a driving force. They see right populism as

a loose political ideology emphasizing faith in the “decent,” “ordinary” or “little” people over the corrupt political and corporate establishment; nationalist interests (Us) over cosmopolitanism cooperation across borders (Them); protectionist policies regulating the movement of trade, people and finance over global free trade; xenophobia over tolerance of multiculturalism; strong individual leadership over diplomatic bargaining and flexible negotiations; isolationism in foreign and defense policies over international engagement; traditional sex roles for women and men over more fluid gender identities and roles, and traditional over progressive values.

I asked Judis and Norris whether the Trump campaign provides a model for a new Republican future. Both answered in the negative.

Judis wrote back:

In order to mimic the European parties, the G.O.P. would have to slough off its business wing, and that is inconceivable to me, especially with Citizens United. The European right does not have strong business support.

Norris looks at another angle: the way in which the populist right is, at its core, a protest movement that is not well equipped for governing:

In Europe, populist parties which enter government coalitions often do lose popular support by disappointing their followers. Moreover, their electoral fortunes are usually erratic, like flash parties which come and go with the leader.

Despite these difficulties, there are some conservatives who intend to capitalize on currents unleashed by the Trump campaign to try to make the Republican Party more attractive to lower wage workers.

Jackie Calmes, in a recent article in The Times, listed a series of policy positions that have been suggested by a loose collection of conservative intellectuals sometimes known as “reformocons.”

These positions include the disavowal of “mass deportations” and the promotion of “the economic benefits of legalizing longtime workers who are in the country illegally,” as well as arguing for “the benefits of global trade agreements,” with help for displaced workers.

Here’s the problem with that agenda. As both Judis and Norris stress, the anti-immigrant message has been crucial to the growth of the European right and to the Trump campaign.

In Europe, Judis writes in his book,

as populist parties gained support for their stand against immigration, they widened their political base. The first populist parties, such as the National Front and the Freedom Party, had been petit-bourgeoisie parties. Their members were drawn primarily from small towns in the countryside, and were small business proprietors and small farmers. Thanks to the reaction to immigration and neoliberalism, what had been petit-bourgeois parties had become workers’ parties.

Judis defines neoliberalism this way:

In the United States, neoliberalism meant the modification, but not wholesale abandonment, of New Deal liberalism — support for the New Deal safety net, but beyond that, priority to market imperatives — while in Europe, it meant the partial return to older free market liberalism.

Theda Skocpol, a professor of government at Harvard, studies both the Tea Party movement and the rise of Trump. She is dubious about reformocon strategy:

The “intellectuals’ ” idea that somehow the G.O.P. is going to start responding to the economic security worries of blue collar/lower middle class Republicans is largely a fantasy. And that is largely because the core of Trump’s support is raw nativism.

In the long run, then, the significance of the Trump campaign may well prove to be the changes he has wrought in the Democratic Party.

As Trump flails in every self-destructive fashion conceivable, the odds increasingly point to a Clinton victory. But if she wins, how well will Clinton be able to govern with a base split between the well-to-do, many of whom seek to protect their enclaves against the interests, needs and classically American ambitions of the other half of the party — low-to-moderate income African-Americans and Hispanics and the truly poor?